Subject: Pray for Peace
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 11:42:45 EDT
From: Sherri via PH, San Francisco
It seems to me that in the next few days, our nation will face important decisions on what means to use in pursuing the war on terrorism.
The following is an excerpt from "A Christmas Sermon on Peace", delivered by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Christmas Eve, 1967. I found it to be quite relevant now, and gives us some sobering thoughts to ponder. Remember when reading this that this man was not naive about the evils of violence. His house was bombed, he survived one assassination attempt and was killed by another just months after this address was given. But he and his family remained committed to pursuing justice and freedom actively but nonviolently.
"One of the great philosophical debates of history has been over the whole question of means and ends. And there have always been those who argued that the end justifies the means, that the means really aren't important...But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means...and ultimately you can't reach good ends
through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.
"It's one of the strangest things that all the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace.
The conquerors of old who came killing in pursuit of peace, Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon, were akin in seeking a peaceful world order. If you will read Mein Kampf closely enough, you will discover that Hitler contended that every think he did in Germany was for peace. And the leaders of the world today talk eloquently about peace. Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means."
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